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Thursday, March 26, 2015

I was reading Neil Gaiman's new novel, The Ocean at the
End of the Lane, today. In the book Neil
referenced C. S. Lewis's Narnia series of books, and as often happens when I
read, this sent my mind off on thoughts of my first experiences of reading
those books. This led to additional
thoughts on the internal chronology of book series versus the order of their
writing/publication.

For some reason, I never got around to reading Narnia as
a child or teen, which is surprising for several reasons. The foremost reason is that I was (and still
am) a great lover of Tolkien, and I knew that he and Lewis were friends and
often shared their works in progress with one another. So I'd obviously heard of Narnia, but for
whatever reason, I didn't get around to checking it out until I was an adult,
and was making the attempt to read a broad swash of fantasy literature to broaden
my own knowledge of the genre.

When I decided to start the Narnia series, I didn't
really think much about the chronology of the series, I simply went to the
bookstore and bought the Narnia book that had a large number one on the cover,
which surely was the book one should start with, no? This was of course the one called "The
Magician's Nephew."

I read the book and found myself a bit disappointed. It really didn't do much for me, and thus I didn’t
follow up with reading the other books for quite a while. My experience with TMN led me to believe the
Narnia books just weren't all they were cracked up to be. There was also the strange feeling I had
while reading TMN that the author assumed I knew more than I did about the
world of Narnia.

A few years later the first of the Narnia films was
released: The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe. I saw the film and quite
enjoyed it, but I wondered why this one was made first, and not TMN. My thought at the time was that perhaps
they'd taken what was the best of the books and made that movie first. Of course, this wasn't the case. What they'd done is taken the first book that
was written and published in the series and made that the first film. I acquired that book and read it, finding it
much better, in my opinion, than TMN. I
almost felt I had been ripped off by the publisher listing TMN as the first
book. Sure, the events of that book took
place at an earlier time than TLTW&TW, but it was actually the sixth book
written. Not only does this sixth book
seem to assume the reader has some knowledge of the first five, but reading it
first takes away some of the charm and delight of reading TLTW&TW first,
when we have no idea what the wardrobe does, and we discover Narnia slowly and
with subtlety.

I've since learned that there is something of a
controversy among Lewis's fans over the order in which the books should be
read. Well, put me firmly in the camp of
original writing order. I find this
applies to most if not all other series of books and films that I've
enjoyed. Take for example the Star Wars
films. I believe that now that six of
them have been made, George Lucas has stated that viewing them from one to six
is appropriate, as he as somehow retconned the whole of the story into
something he calls "The Tragedy of Darth Vader." To me, and to the nine-year-old me that
watched Star Wars many times in the theater in the summer of 1977, this is
utter bullshit. Introducing a new viewer
to the series with that god-awful mess of a film called The Phantom Menace not
only risks turning them off with a far lesser product, but it takes away the power
of the earlier (though chronologically later) films as they slowly reveal facts
(Such as Darth's relationship to Luke) that are the ultimate moments of those
films.

Another series of books that I was quite fond of as a
child, and still continue to revisit from time to time, is Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders
of Pern series. These books now number
more than twenty, with more coming, as her son Todd has taken over the helm of
writing them. I read the first six books
when I was a kid in the early '80s, then additional ones as they were published. Since the books jump back and forth through
Pern's several thousand year history over the course of many volumes, I could
see that a potential controversy similar to the Narnia series could develop. Does one start reading with the later volume
Dragonsdawn, when the colonists first settled Pern, or with the first book in the series that McCaffrey published, Dragonflight? The
author herself weighs in on the matter.
On some of the cover pages of the later novels a blub by McCaffrey states: The author respectfully suggests that the books in the Pern series be read in
the order in which they were published.

I couldn't agree more.
Readers deserve to discover the wonders of a rich speculative world by
way of the same path that the writer did.